Motorola "spun off" (ie: ditched) their chip-making business. Inmos - owned by a music chain, Thorn EMI - was sold to ST and their technology was dumped. IIT, a co-processor manufacturer in the days of the 8086 to 80286 died a death. Cyrix was bought, as mentioned.
This is a field where you must not only have a good product, you must also have a solid market AND a solid marketing team, AND you must avoid bad PR like the plague, AND any major players (like Intel) must not deliberately sabotage efforts to compete, AND your plant can't be struck by major earthquakes.
(Why are all the major chip makers in Taiwan, Japan and America ALL concentrated in areas with high tectonic activity? Is there something in the fault line they use in the production line?)
The bottom line is simple. A chip fabrication plant can cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, skilled chip designers can command hefty salaries, many of the key markets are 0wn3d by monopolies of questionable legality who flirt with unethical practices to keep their position, and software developers reinforce this by targetting established, high-volume platforms and that means no new products get support.
Of course, Transmeta didn't help its case. Its Linux distro was late, the first batch of chips was buggy, they didn't sell to anyone outside of the "big players" (and "big players" only really buy from other "big players", because volume bought and sold = profit), and they only produced an 80x86 layer for the Crusoe, rather than using the capabilities to cross market boundaries and therefore create volume by getting into many niche markets.
Also, their design was poor. Intel beat them on power consumption in a very short space of time, and this is Intel we are talking about. At the same time, people knew there were problems with 80x86 scalability (hence the work on SMP and hyperthreading), but Transmeta didn't look far enough ahead to build a multicore product, when they were already building a design from scratch and had ample opportunity to make such changes.
(In comparison, AMD and Intel have to engineer such features into an existing design, which is always much harder and likely to be much slower than working from first principles. AMD's and Intel's route also offers much better odds of bugs being found in the design, at a later date, as their architecture was never intended to be multicore.)
So, I don't hold Transmeta blameless in this. They may have been pushed over the edge, but they still chose to walk along the cliff in the first place, knowing it to be a dangerous spot, and knowing that the view wasn't even that good there, to make it worth the risk.
One of these days, I hope to see a company start up that takes the time to be truly innovative (and not just fake it), takes the time to get things right, and makes a product so damn unbeatable it wipes the floor with everything else.
It does happen. True, AMD is no start-up, but they were hardly giants in the 80x86 world. With the Opteron and their 64/32-bit crossover architecture, they've demolished Intel's Itanium and even convinced Microsoft to switch to them for 64-bit stuff. Given the longevity of the Wintel duopoly, that took a good plan and a good effort.
Any start-up could do just as well, or better, because it wouldn't have the legacy hardware to build around. They could do a clean design that merely supported legacy code. Transmeta started down that road, but for some reason chose only to camp a little way down it and go no further.
The "ideal" processor would work just as well as a CPU, GPU, network processor or processor for a disk array, as then a manufacturer can go to a single vendor, buy in even bigger bulk, and save money on all aspects. Your computer would become a Beowulf cluster, in effect, with specialization in software. It would be cheaper to build, and would mean that the same system would work for a desktop or a server. You'd simply load in different specializing software, to shift the processing
I've worked for several years both creating programs inside the database and on a server layer outside it (and also just about every other layer).
I have to agree with grassbeetle above.
Software architecture-wise: - You can't make a scalable architecture if you put everything in one single place (in this case the database). - You will be hard-pressed to create a failure tolerant architecture if you stuff everything in a single point of failure. - Databases are NOT application servers. They are designed with data storage and retrieval in mind, not reliable execution of complex business logic. Amongst other things databases do not make available in an easy and/or reliable way some of the standard application server functionality. - All external components of the application (for example UIs) have to connect to the database. You're now stuck to using the connection protocols from the chosen database. This might cause all sort of problems with security, firewalls, use of asychronous messaging, availability of adaptors in the platform you are deploying your applications to, etc... - Spliting your application accross several servers or in a multi-tiered geographical distribution is much harder. - All coders have to have a good knowledge on how to work with the specific database you are using. - Programing inside databases is not standartized. Different databases and indeed different versions of the same database have sometimes different versions of the same language or different libraries available. The language/libraries have not been so throughly used/tested/examined by a big user comunity (while for example standard C/Java/etc libraries have been thouroughly debugged in billions of man-hours of use). This means more library bugs and a lack of third party tools for software design and development inside the database. - Facilities such as version control, source control, etc are either not available or difficult to use in a reliable manner. - Availability of compatible 3rd party libraries or application modules is very, very restricted by comparison to NOT having your server side logic all inside the database. - Forget about moving databases in the future. Also, simple migrating to a newer version of the database can be a nightmare.
Software design-wise, the design of the software will be strongly constrained by the internal structure of the database: - Information flows will mostly have to be database-like information flows - A true object oriented structure is pretty much impossible. At the most you can do weakly connected islands with an objecte oriented structure. If the database language you have to use is procedural forget about OO design. - Server-side initiated connections to outside entities, thread control, ditributed transactions and other more advanced functionalities are pretty much impossible. - Usage/integration with 3rd party libraries or application modules is very hard or even impossible.
Software programming-wise, and from my experience (mostly Oracle): - The language sucks. - The application libraries (not the DBA ones) suck big time.
Simply put, a software architect that puts all server-side logic inside the database is with this single choice removing almost all his other architecture options and creating/fortifying vendor lock-in of the application to the database itself and 3rd party tools and also of the development team itself by means of the knowledge experience they have/will gain with said database and said 3rd party tools.
Such a person should IMHO either be demoted to a place were he/she can't cause any damage or fired outright.
Stem cells might be a neat buzzword to get funding, but as a parent of a child with serious brain damage, I can tell you that this is more likely a politically motivated stunt to grease the slippery slope of stem cell research, than something that will generate measurable results. After all, nobody wants to hurt brain damaged children.
The reason I'm so cynical is that babies are very resilient, and for the most part they are like stem cell factories on their own. As they grow, they produce new brain and nerve material, which adults cannot do. It is adult disease and injury (and greed) that fuels the stem cell craze, since our adult bodies cannot heal like young children can.
My daughter had a stroke two months before she was born. This stroke wiped out 85% of the left hemisphere of her brain, replacing it with a fluid filled cyst. When she was three months old, she had an operation to add a drainage passage to this cyst, as it was filling with cerebral spinal fluid and had expanded to fill the entire left half of her cranium cavity. This operation cut through parts of her brain, leaving her completely blind.
At nine months of age, the drainage passage had collapsed, and the cyst had enlarged to block all drainage of cerebral spinal fluid from her brain. Her head swelled with a condition know as hydrocephalus, and she almost died. That night, the CAT scans showed that 75% of the volume that should have been occupied by her brain was filled with fluid. She had an emergency operation to install an artificial drainage valve (a shunt). This event was catastrophic, and was like having her "reset" switch activated, she had to re-learn everything.
Now, the good news. She is eighteen months old now, and has recovered remarkably. Her last CAT scan showed that the original cyst had been reduced to only 25% of the left half of her brain, and the right half is completely restored. The original passage that was cut, that caused her blindness, has healed shut. Her vision is steadily improving and she shows signs that she may be functional without the use of a cane someday. Sure, she's a little behind developmentally, but she is showing lots of promise. All of her healing was without the use of any stem cell treatment, because babies are stem cell factories. Her same injuries would have killed an adult, several times over.
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well. What they produced was an absolute mess. CSS boxes were built to IE handling, and rendered incorrectly on Mozilla, which they consistently referred to as "Mozarella". They believed all problems seen on Mozilla were Mozilla bugs, and they added browser detection and workarounds. Of course it still failed on Opera and Konqueror. They used an awful piece of Javascript to make dropdown menus.
When they were done, maintenance was handed over to me and I gradually changed all their work to make a standards-conformant site that still rendered the same way. It was a lot of work, starting from the dire state it was in. But finally, it renders OK and the menus work on most browsers without using javascript.
Exceptions: - CSS menu only works in IE by including csshover.htc (conditional inclusion using !--[if IE]...). maybe IE7 will support:hover on list items? - IE4 and below don't quite cut it, fallback to javascript code using serverside UA string detect. these are dying anyway, probably I will remove this support when IE7 appears. - bug 234788 in GECKO means the menu disappears when mouse moves over scrollable text area. this bug has been fixed in GECKO but Mozilla and Firefox keep releasing new versions based on the broken GECKO for over a year.... We want Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla 1.8!!!
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding. They just use successive approximation towards the "browsers they test with", and try to impress managers with "browser utilisation percentages" instead of standards compliance.
Unfortunately a few passes with random data is not as effective against a sophisticated recovery effort as is often assumed. Now if it's just some random joe with an undelete program he got for $19.99 at the local shop then a single pass is often enough, more sophisticated software only tools might get past a few, but with hardware equipment (probably not used often below the fbi/pro forensics places) you might want to do something a bit more secure. With good knowledge of how the data is actually stored on the disk you can figure out patterns that tend to degausse the bits being wiped and help eleminate the residual images left by the micro imperfection in head positioning (which are shrinking to almost nothing these days) and simular effects a trully sophisticated data recovery effort might use.
Peter Gutman put out a paper about this that can be read at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_ del.html that explains it better. Though with remapping and newer recording techniques things change and software only erasure becomes more and more problematic. At the highest levels of secrecy I believe most governments require over-kill levels of outright hardware destruction.
The list of backwards compatible games will grow over time, so if you're not already signed up for Xbox Live (even Silver, which is free), you should do so. Enjoy your 360!
I thought too that the US were a long way ahead in technology. I came for a conference in Austin, TX last November, and on the way back I stayed for a week in NY. I was disappointed in some ways: How comes that I can't bloody call Europe from a payphone in Chicago airport? And where are the credit-card phones? It's an international airport, not a café! It's not that I did not try, and I tried the week later too. Yes, I know you use 011 instead of 00. It finally worked on Broadway by the 50th street. Why doesn't my damn GSM mobile work? What's the fuss with multiple standards over here? (Yes, my phone is a triple band and was supposed to work in NY and Chicago, though not Austin). Damn, these work in Thailand, why don't they work in the US? The conference in Austin was AIChE [aiche.org] 2004. Number of participants: about 5,000. Number of complimentary internet connections: 0. Luckily there was a nice café at 6th/Congress with free access to Macs. My Diners stopped working for a couple of days, and the Visa was dead. It would work early in the morning. (This one is getting flamed)The statue of Liberty is small!!! I can't believe it's taller than the one in my town [antaresarona.com]. Why are still stuck in the stone, pound and foot age? Times square: it's not square to begin with, and it's ludicrously small. It looks so big in the images from new year's eve...
Ok, ok, I have to compensate with some positive points... Ok, there are people who speak other language than English. I expected worse, on the plane to New York I was sitting beside a girl who completely by chance spoke Italian (and not bad either!). Ellis Island more than compensated for Liberty Island. The museum there was cool, even if I did not find my grandfather's brother in the archives. Food is nowhere near terrible as in England, and because of Mexico food in Austin was actually quite good. Que vivan los migrantes! I happened to hear the Veteran's Day speech at the Texas capitol. Sorry for the people governed by these beasts, but for me it was an experience to see the closest thing to a Nazi rally I will ever witness (I hope). Prospect park in NY rules! Now, when I see "Venner for livet" (Friends) or "Sex og singelliv" (Sex and the city) I actually recognize the places!
Anyway, back to the point: the US are not as advanced as many, Americans and not, think they are. At least not in the level of technology the citizens are exposed to, I have definitely seen enough to deem it unlikely that I was victim of a long series of unlucky coincidences.
Slashdot Mirror
Motorola "spun off" (ie: ditched) their chip-making business. Inmos - owned by a music chain, Thorn EMI - was sold to ST and their technology was dumped. IIT, a co-processor manufacturer in the days of the 8086 to 80286 died a death. Cyrix was bought, as mentioned.
This is a field where you must not only have a good product, you must also have a solid market AND a solid marketing team, AND you must avoid bad PR like the plague, AND any major players (like Intel) must not deliberately sabotage efforts to compete, AND your plant can't be struck by major earthquakes.
(Why are all the major chip makers in Taiwan, Japan and America ALL concentrated in areas with high tectonic activity? Is there something in the fault line they use in the production line?)
The bottom line is simple. A chip fabrication plant can cost tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars, skilled chip designers can command hefty salaries, many of the key markets are 0wn3d by monopolies of questionable legality who flirt with unethical practices to keep their position, and software developers reinforce this by targetting established, high-volume platforms and that means no new products get support.
Of course, Transmeta didn't help its case. Its Linux distro was late, the first batch of chips was buggy, they didn't sell to anyone outside of the "big players" (and "big players" only really buy from other "big players", because volume bought and sold = profit), and they only produced an 80x86 layer for the Crusoe, rather than using the capabilities to cross market boundaries and therefore create volume by getting into many niche markets.
Also, their design was poor. Intel beat them on power consumption in a very short space of time, and this is Intel we are talking about. At the same time, people knew there were problems with 80x86 scalability (hence the work on SMP and hyperthreading), but Transmeta didn't look far enough ahead to build a multicore product, when they were already building a design from scratch and had ample opportunity to make such changes.
(In comparison, AMD and Intel have to engineer such features into an existing design, which is always much harder and likely to be much slower than working from first principles. AMD's and Intel's route also offers much better odds of bugs being found in the design, at a later date, as their architecture was never intended to be multicore.)
So, I don't hold Transmeta blameless in this. They may have been pushed over the edge, but they still chose to walk along the cliff in the first place, knowing it to be a dangerous spot, and knowing that the view wasn't even that good there, to make it worth the risk.
One of these days, I hope to see a company start up that takes the time to be truly innovative (and not just fake it), takes the time to get things right, and makes a product so damn unbeatable it wipes the floor with everything else.
It does happen. True, AMD is no start-up, but they were hardly giants in the 80x86 world. With the Opteron and their 64/32-bit crossover architecture, they've demolished Intel's Itanium and even convinced Microsoft to switch to them for 64-bit stuff. Given the longevity of the Wintel duopoly, that took a good plan and a good effort.
Any start-up could do just as well, or better, because it wouldn't have the legacy hardware to build around. They could do a clean design that merely supported legacy code. Transmeta started down that road, but for some reason chose only to camp a little way down it and go no further.
The "ideal" processor would work just as well as a CPU, GPU, network processor or processor for a disk array, as then a manufacturer can go to a single vendor, buy in even bigger bulk, and save money on all aspects. Your computer would become a Beowulf cluster, in effect, with specialization in software. It would be cheaper to build, and would mean that the same system would work for a desktop or a server. You'd simply load in different specializing software, to shift the processing
I've worked for several years both creating programs inside the database and on a server layer outside it (and also just about every other layer).
I have to agree with grassbeetle above.
Software architecture-wise:
- You can't make a scalable architecture if you put everything in one single place (in this case the database).
- You will be hard-pressed to create a failure tolerant architecture if you stuff everything in a single point of failure.
- Databases are NOT application servers. They are designed with data storage and retrieval in mind, not reliable execution of complex business logic. Amongst other things databases do not make available in an easy and/or reliable way some of the standard application server functionality.
- All external components of the application (for example UIs) have to connect to the database. You're now stuck to using the connection protocols from the chosen database. This might cause all sort of problems with security, firewalls, use of asychronous messaging, availability of adaptors in the platform you are deploying your applications to, etc...
- Spliting your application accross several servers or in a multi-tiered geographical distribution is much harder.
- All coders have to have a good knowledge on how to work with the specific database you are using.
- Programing inside databases is not standartized. Different databases and indeed different versions of the same database have sometimes different versions of the same language or different libraries available. The language/libraries have not been so throughly used/tested/examined by a big user comunity (while for example standard C/Java/etc libraries have been thouroughly debugged in billions of man-hours of use). This means more library bugs and a lack of third party tools for software design and development inside the database.
- Facilities such as version control, source control, etc are either not available or difficult to use in a reliable manner.
- Availability of compatible 3rd party libraries or application modules is very, very restricted by comparison to NOT having your server side logic all inside the database.
- Forget about moving databases in the future. Also, simple migrating to a newer version of the database can be a nightmare.
Software design-wise, the design of the software will be strongly constrained by the internal structure of the database:
- Information flows will mostly have to be database-like information flows
- A true object oriented structure is pretty much impossible. At the most you can do weakly connected islands with an objecte oriented structure. If the database language you have to use is procedural forget about OO design.
- Server-side initiated connections to outside entities, thread control, ditributed transactions and other more advanced functionalities are pretty much impossible.
- Usage/integration with 3rd party libraries or application modules is very hard or even impossible.
Software programming-wise, and from my experience (mostly Oracle):
- The language sucks.
- The application libraries (not the DBA ones) suck big time.
Simply put, a software architect that puts all server-side logic inside the database is with this single choice removing almost all his other architecture options and creating/fortifying vendor lock-in of the application to the database itself and 3rd party tools and also of the development team itself by means of the knowledge experience they have/will gain with said database and said 3rd party tools.
Such a person should IMHO either be demoted to a place were he/she can't cause any damage or fired outright.
Stem cells might be a neat buzzword to get funding, but as a parent of a child with serious brain damage, I can tell you that this is more likely a politically motivated stunt to grease the slippery slope of stem cell research, than something that will generate measurable results. After all, nobody wants to hurt brain damaged children.
The reason I'm so cynical is that babies are very resilient, and for the most part they are like stem cell factories on their own. As they grow, they produce new brain and nerve material, which adults cannot do. It is adult disease and injury (and greed) that fuels the stem cell craze, since our adult bodies cannot heal like young children can.
My daughter had a stroke two months before she was born. This stroke wiped out 85% of the left hemisphere of her brain, replacing it with a fluid filled cyst. When she was three months old, she had an operation to add a drainage passage to this cyst, as it was filling with cerebral spinal fluid and had expanded to fill the entire left half of her cranium cavity. This operation cut through parts of her brain, leaving her completely blind.
At nine months of age, the drainage passage had collapsed, and the cyst had enlarged to block all drainage of cerebral spinal fluid from her brain. Her head swelled with a condition know as hydrocephalus, and she almost died. That night, the CAT scans showed that 75% of the volume that should have been occupied by her brain was filled with fluid. She had an emergency operation to install an artificial drainage valve (a shunt). This event was catastrophic, and was like having her "reset" switch activated, she had to re-learn everything.
Now, the good news. She is eighteen months old now, and has recovered remarkably. Her last CAT scan showed that the original cyst had been reduced to only 25% of the left half of her brain, and the right half is completely restored. The original passage that was cut, that caused her blindness, has healed shut. Her vision is steadily improving and she shows signs that she may be functional without the use of a cane someday. Sure, she's a little behind developmentally, but she is showing lots of promise. All of her healing was without the use of any stem cell treatment, because babies are stem cell factories. Her same injuries would have killed an adult, several times over.
Our website was built by a "website design bureau". We told them it had to be standard, so it would work on Mozilla as well.
What they produced was an absolute mess. CSS boxes were built to IE handling, and rendered incorrectly on Mozilla, which they consistently referred to as "Mozarella". They believed all problems seen on Mozilla were Mozilla bugs, and they added browser detection and workarounds.
Of course it still failed on Opera and Konqueror.
They used an awful piece of Javascript to make dropdown menus.
When they were done, maintenance was handed over to me and I gradually changed all their work to make a standards-conformant site that still rendered the same way. It was a lot of work, starting from the dire state it was in.
But finally, it renders OK and the menus work on most browsers without using javascript.
Exceptions:
- CSS menu only works in IE by including csshover.htc (conditional inclusion using !--[if IE]...). maybe IE7 will support:hover on list items?
- IE4 and below don't quite cut it, fallback to javascript code using serverside UA string detect. these are dying anyway, probably I will remove this support when IE7 appears.
- bug 234788 in GECKO means the menu disappears when mouse moves over scrollable text area. this bug has been fixed in GECKO but Mozilla and Firefox keep releasing new versions based on the broken GECKO for over a year.... We want Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla 1.8!!!
What I learnt: use a website design bureau only to make a site design. Don't allow them anywhere near HTML coding. They just use successive approximation towards the "browsers they test with", and try to impress managers with "browser utilisation percentages" instead of standards compliance.
Unfortunately a few passes with random data is not as effective against a sophisticated recovery effort as is often assumed.
_ del.html
Now if it's just some random joe with an undelete program he got for $19.99 at the local shop then a single pass is often enough, more sophisticated software only tools might get past a few, but with hardware equipment (probably not used often below the fbi/pro forensics places) you might want to do something a bit more secure.
With good knowledge of how the data is actually stored on the disk you can figure out patterns that tend to degausse the bits being wiped and help eleminate the residual images left by the micro imperfection in head positioning (which are shrinking to almost nothing these days) and simular effects a trully sophisticated data recovery effort might use.
Peter Gutman put out a paper about this that can be read at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure
that explains it better.
Though with remapping and newer recording techniques things change and software only erasure becomes more and more problematic. At the highest levels of secrecy I believe most governments require over-kill levels of outright hardware destruction.
Here are some links you'll find useful:
l itygameslist.htmu nch-day-titles/a rketplace-launch-content/
Backwards compatible title list:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/backwardcompatibi
Launch titles:
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/11/14/xbox-360-la
Arcade titles:
http://www.majornelson.com/2005/11/15/xbox-live-m
The list of backwards compatible games will grow over time, so if you're not already signed up for Xbox Live (even Silver, which is free), you should do so. Enjoy your 360!
I thought too that the US were a long way ahead in technology. I came for a conference in Austin, TX last November, and on the way back I stayed for a week in NY. I was disappointed in some ways:
How comes that I can't bloody call Europe from a payphone in Chicago airport? And where are the credit-card phones? It's an international airport, not a café! It's not that I did not try, and I tried the week later too. Yes, I know you use 011 instead of 00. It finally worked on Broadway by the 50th street.
Why doesn't my damn GSM mobile work? What's the fuss with multiple standards over here? (Yes, my phone is a triple band and was supposed to work in NY and Chicago, though not Austin). Damn, these work in Thailand, why don't they work in the US?
The conference in Austin was AIChE [aiche.org] 2004. Number of participants: about 5,000. Number of complimentary internet connections: 0. Luckily there was a nice café at 6th/Congress with free access to Macs.
My Diners stopped working for a couple of days, and the Visa was dead. It would work early in the morning.
(This one is getting flamed)The statue of Liberty is small!!! I can't believe it's taller than the one in my town [antaresarona.com].
Why are still stuck in the stone, pound and foot age?
Times square: it's not square to begin with, and it's ludicrously small. It looks so big in the images from new year's eve...
Ok, ok, I have to compensate with some positive points...
Ok, there are people who speak other language than English. I expected worse, on the plane to New York I was sitting beside a girl who completely by chance spoke Italian (and not bad either!).
Ellis Island more than compensated for Liberty Island. The museum there was cool, even if I did not find my grandfather's brother in the archives.
Food is nowhere near terrible as in England, and because of Mexico food in Austin was actually quite good. Que vivan los migrantes!
I happened to hear the Veteran's Day speech at the Texas capitol. Sorry for the people governed by these beasts, but for me it was an experience to see the closest thing to a Nazi rally I will ever witness (I hope).
Prospect park in NY rules!
Now, when I see "Venner for livet" (Friends) or "Sex og singelliv" (Sex and the city) I actually recognize the places!
Anyway, back to the point: the US are not as advanced as many, Americans and not, think they are. At least not in the level of technology the citizens are exposed to, I have definitely seen enough to deem it unlikely that I was victim of a long series of unlucky coincidences.